Summertime
by Evergreene
Summary: She finds Sam in Wyoming, on his knees before the Devil’s Gate.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: If they were mine, they'd have hugged it out already.**

**A/N: Though I liked season four's "I Know What You Did Last Summer," I've always wanted to know more about what Sam went through whilst Dean was in hell. And I really, really wanted to see him trying to open the Devil's Gate. :)**

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**Summertime**

She finds him in Wyoming, on his knees before the Devil's Gate. Around him, thunder cracks as lightning spears the air, splintering into broken fingers that hang like webs in the night sky before dissolving into blackness. As she strides towards him, moving quickly between the many gravestones that litter the small cemetery like sentinels, driving sheets of rain batter her, slicing into the bare skin of her face and hands like sharp, stinging bullets.

With a few steps more she is behind him, breathing in the damp scent of the storm. Carefully, she drops her hand onto his back, soft and tender, caressing the taut muscles that are clenched beneath her fingers. His head jolts, panicked, but as soon as he realises that it is her, he lets it drop back down so his forehead brushes the upright stone surface in front of him.

When he speaks, his words are barely audible under the deafening roar of the tempest that rages around them.

"I thought I had it."

"What are you talking about?" she murmurs, kneeling down so her face is mere inches from his. She continues kneading the tightly clenched muscles of his neck, pleased that, for once, he hasn't recoiled from her touch.

"I was so close," he says instead, and he reaches out a hand, running it softly over the hellgate. "It moved. I know it…I felt it _move_, Ruby. But I couldn't get it open. I couldn't reach him."

As his slow, slightly slurred words register, she sees the edges of a deep, bloody cut protruding round the edges of his palm, sees the glint of a muddied silver knife lying discarded by his feet, the stash of witchstuff strewn over the soaked, bare earth only a few yards away, and she realises what he has tried to do.

"Sam-" she says, but he cuts her off again, his voice wretched.

"I'm so close to him," he whispers, and he lifts the wounded hand that is pressed against the cold, soaked stone and slams it down, hard. The next moment, he's on his feet, pounding his fists against the solid granite wall that is the Devil's Gate, leaving trails of slick blood where his skin catches and splits on the carven rock. He's shouting, his words mostly lost in the roar of the storm, but she can hear the twisted bellow of pain and rage and grief and guilt that quickly morphs into a desperate plea for his brother to come back, to return to him, to have never gone at all.

In a second, she's on him, pulling at his arm. "Sam!" she shouts, fighting to make her voice heard above the cacophony of Sam's own cries and the raging thunderstorm that has enveloped them, battering and buffering them both. "Sam, listen to me! It's useless! He's not coming back! Dean's gone."

At the sound of his brother's name, Sam turns on her, his face tear-stricken and twisted, wretched with fury and anguish and a shame so deep that she can see it eating away at him, devouring him like a many-headed monster. She reaches up and grabs his chin, makes him look at her even as he struggles to pull away.

"He's gone," she repeats, softly but firmly, and, finally, _finally_,she sees it sink in. His fist, raised to strike her, drops, and he staggers, almost sending them both crashing to the ground. But she pushes back against him, manages to keep him on his feet, cursing the pouring rain that makes the ground slippery wet.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, staring at her, sodden strands of hair hanging over dark, guilty eyes which, she now realises, are unfocused and wavering, giving away the lingering effects of the alcohol he had promised her not to consume.

She meets his gaze, knowing it's not her he's apologising to. "I know, Sammy," she says.

It takes her a long time to get Sam back to a motel room. He's heavy and stumbling and almost incoherent as she half-carries, half-drags him to the Impala, left abandoned by the graveyard entrance with its doors open to the storm, and shoves him into the passenger seat. He curls into the dark, wet leather like it's his second home, and as she slams the door behind him and crosses to the driver's side, she can see his eyes move blearily to the seat beside him, then drop away in disappointment when he doesn't find who he's looking for.

Silently, she opens her own door and climbs in. Sam doesn't say a word as she reaches over and fishes the car keys out of the pocket of his saturated jacket, nor as she starts the Impala for the first time, relishing the low growl of the engine beneath her as she pulls out onto the slick black road and heads towards the nearest motel she knows of.

Almost two hours later, she has Sam showered and dressed in clothes that are warm and dry, and she's leaning against the wall of the motel room, her hands behind her back, watching him as he sits silently on the bed, staring at the ground, his head cradled in his long fingers. He's pulled on an old hoodie that looks a few sizes too small for him, and it makes him look younger, innocent, more like the Sam she'd met over a year ago, before the loss of his brother had hollowed him out, scraping away the last vestiges of the little brother he had once been.

Abruptly, he stands up, wavering slightly before finding his balance.

"I'm going out."

Before he has taken more than a couple of steps, she has pushed herself upright and moved towards the door, angling herself so that she is not quite blocking it with her body. She has worked too long and hard on Sam Winchester to let him go out and drink himself to death now.

"Don't," he says to her. "Just…I need to be alone right now, Ruby. You should go."

She stands her ground. "I'm not leaving you."

"You should. I'm a monster. A freak."

She shakes her head in denial and reaches out a hand to him, but he withdraws from her, his eyes lingering on the long, half-healed cut at her wrist before he jerks them away. "You're not," she continues, evenly, decisively. "You're doing what needs to be done."

He shakes his head. "If Dean was here…if he knew what I'd done…"

"He doesn't."

"I drank your blood," he whispers, as though saying it out loud would make it true, would make it real. "How could I do something like that?"

"Because it'll help you kill Lilith!" she snaps, forgetting herself. "That's what you want, isn't it? "

He flinches back towards the bed and she curses silently. Berating herself, she makes her voice soft and soothing. She wants to keep him with her, have him see her as he person she once was, not as the demon she is now.

"It'll do more than that. With the blood, you can save people. Soon you'll be able to exorcise demons right out of their hosts, even destroy them, all without using the knife. No more killing, Sam, no one else dead because of you."

Sam stares at her, his eyes still haunted, but within them she can see a small spark of understanding and, beneath that, a pallid flicker of hope. He believes her about the blood, at least, or is starting to, and that's all that matters.

Slowly, he steps backwards and sinks down onto the mattress. Just as slowly, she joins him, moving to his side, pressing herself against him, knowing that her valuable charge isn't going anywhere, not that night.

But later, as she listens to the deep, slow breaths of the man sleeping restlessly on the other side of the bed, the warmth of his body like a furnace despite the empty distance between them, she wonders if Sam is still strong enough to do what needs to be done, to be what He needs him to he be, wonders whether the loss of his brother, though necessary, had damaged Sam too much. And as she stares through the darkness at the hard curve of his spine, lit by a gleam of moonlight through the window, she thinks back on the past few hours, on the soft feel of Sam's mouth at her wrist, on the sight of him on his knees in a Wyoming graveyard with a bloody knife by his feet, and she wonders to herself whether Sam Winchester had been trying to get his brother out of hell, or get himself in.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: It turns out that I wanted to know a _lot_ more about Sam's summer-of-doom, so I decided to add a bit to the story. Hope you like! **

**NB. Just a note that this story strays a bit from canon (but then again, we've never really been given a definitive answer to where exactly Sam went when he died, so I decided to make up my own answer for the purposes of this story).**

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After Wyoming, Sam starts to accept her. He doesn't trust her, not yet, but the blood draws him inward, leashing him closer with each day that passes. Every so often, however, in spite the pull her blood has on him, he disappears without trace or tale, vanishing in the dead of night or during a bright summer day, sometimes not returning for close to a week. She thinks that he is visiting his brother, buried in a clandestine grave somewhere under the blazing summer sun, but he never tells her where he is going and she never asks. Their alliance is tenuous at best, brittle and still easily broken, and she does not want to strain it. So she allows him his privacy, is there when he needs her but no more.

It's rare that they sleep together, but it does happen, usually when Sam is drunk, because even with his reluctant promise to sober up, he still slips occasionally, falls into the black hole that is his grief. Alcohol has become his crutch, the thing that he turns to when he just can't deal anymore. At the days pass though, and the weeks grow into months, he starts to turn to her instead, using the rush that the blood gives him to mask the pain, to change the guilt into a righteous anger.

Slowly, they start to work together more and more. She guides him towards hunts and on occasion acts as backup. She saves his life a couple more times, building his trust in her. And she trains him, teaching him to use the powers he was given as a babe.

Every once in a while, a certain look comes into his eyes and she knows that he is wavering in the choices he has made, that doubt has crept into his mind once again, stealing past the bulwark that is his brother's death, worming its way through the grief and guilt and fury that are Sam's constant companions, and she knows that the next day he will refuse the blood she offers him. In retaliation, as punishment, she reminds him that every demon he sends back to hell with an exorcism is one more demon that can torture Dean, that every time he uses the knife, another person is dead because of him. And she reminds him that she can make him strong enough to kill. The first time, it is three days before he caves and presses his mouth to her wrist. The next time, it is only a few hours.

One night, as they lie on opposite sides of the motel room bed, Sam having shunned her touch, depriving himself for once of the punishment she knows she is for him, she asks a question to which she already knows the answer, wanting to find out just what he will trust her with, just how far he is willing to let her in.

"Do you remember it?" she says carefully.

"Remember what?"

She remains quiet, waiting for Sam to admit to her what he has admitted to nobody, letting the silence speak for itself.

There's a long pause. But then his voice finally parts the darkness like a knife through butter.

"A bit of it. Sometimes."

She waits for him to say more, but instead he rolls over and out of bed, apparently done with the conversation. So she sits up, blankets pooling around her waist, and catches hold of his arm.

"You never told Dean, did you?"

Sam stiffens, his whole body becoming tense and drawn, like a rubber band that is about to snap. The next second, he has wrenched his arm out of her grasp and her nails have torn into his skin, leaving a row of shallow red gouges etched into the underside of his wrist like a brand.

"Why didn't you tell him?" she presses.

"Why do you even care?" he snaps back. "And for that matter, how do you even know where I went?"

She lifts an eyebrow at him, allows a smirk to creep onto her face, tilting the corners of her mouth slyly upwards. "Come on, Sam. You've had demon blood in you since you were six months old. Somehow I didn't really think they'd have welcomed you at the pearly gates with open arms."

Even in the darkness, she can see a mixture of emotions flash across Sam's face, but he quickly suppresses them all. Next moment, he has disappeared silently into the adjoining bathroom, shutting the door tightly behind him, and she is alone.

It's a long time before the door opens again, casting a narrow ribbon of florescent light onto the mattress where she sits cross-legged, silently waiting. She looks up at the shadowed figure that emerges, follows it the length of the room as Sam crosses to his duffel bag that is draped across a lone chair, and watches as he bends down to rummage inside.

She makes her voice soft for her second attempt. "So why didn't you tell Dean?"

Sam stops for a moment, his arm still buried half-way in his duffel, his hair falling forward hiding his eyes from the meager light that permeates the motel room. "Because he would've asked me what it was like," he says finally.

"So?"

Sam's eyes flick fleetingly up to hers. "So I didn't want to scare him."

She watches him drop the bag onto the floor and settle down in the chair, obviously not intending to sleep again that night. "I've been there too," she says quietly, her voice soothing and persuasive. "You can tell me."

Sam doesn't reply, but when she opens her eyes the next morning, he is lying in bed beside her and doesn't object as she leans over him and begins to whisper into his ear about the many horrors of hell.

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**Thanks for reading, everyone. Reviews are loved. :)**


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